The Penge Mystery: the murder of Harriet Staunton

In 1877, Harriet Staunton's husband and three others were accused of starving her to death and lurid newspaper reports of the Penge murder trial held the nation's rapt attention. A bestselling novel about the affair – written in 1934 and now republished – proves as gripping today

The only photograph of Harriet Staunton, taken on her engagement in 1876.

Only one photograph is known to exist of Harriet Staunton, nee Richardson: it was taken to mark the occasion of her engagement at the age of 33 to a hard-up auctioneer's clerk, Louis Staunton, in 1874. At first glance, she looks like any other woman of her class. Her dress is modestly high-necked; her toque, worn stylishly forward, is lavishly trimmed; her hair, drawn back to reveal the ears, ends in a confection of coiled plaits (these would have been made of "false" hair, which remained fashionable until the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine sounded its death knell in 1876). Examine the image more closely, though, and instinct suggests that all is not as it seems. The woman's eyelids are heavy and drooping; her smile, stretched like soft leather over bony knuckles, is more grimace than grin. The impression is of a woman who, being not entirely sensible of the world, is only playing the part of excited bride-to-be.

The facts back up one's instincts. Harriet Staunton had what we would call learning difficulties: her ladylike appearance was the result of dogged coaching by her mother, Mrs Butterfield, who had always made sure her daughter was clean and well turned out, with the result that, in time, Harriet grew to be rather particular about her appearance. Happily, both women could afford to be sartorially indulgent. Harriet's other advantage in life, besides her devoted and forward-thinking parent, was a legacy of £5,000 (about £500,000 today), courtesy of a great aunt. Though prone to rages and queer moods, Harriet was not confined to home. She loved to make shopping trips, on one of which she must have bought her pretty hat. She also made regular visits to relatives, who sometimes received money for taking care of her, giving her mother a little respite – and it was during one of these, in 1873, that she met Louis Staunton. Thomas Hincksman, the son of Harriet's aunt, Mrs Ellis, had married a widow, and in doing so had gained two stepdaughters: Elizabeth, 23, and Alice, 15. Elizabeth had recently married an artist, Patrick Staunton; his elder brother, to whom Patrick was passionately devoted, was 23-year-old Louis.

Louis was at this point already deeply in love with his brother's sister-in-law, Alice Rhodes. But he was also a ruthless fortune hunter and, after only the briefest of courtships, he and Harriet were engaged. Naturally, Mrs Butterfield, who had never expected to see her daughter the object of any man's desire, was suspicious. But her opposition to the match – at one point, she tried to place her daughter under the protection of the court of chancery as a lunatic – did no good. Harriet, enraged, left her mother's house to live with Mrs Ellis in Walworth, south London, and it was from there that she was married, on 16 June 1875.

Eager not to lose touch with Harriet, Mrs Butterfield, who did not attend the wedding, called at a house the couple had taken in Brixton three weeks later. This meeting was, she reported afterwards, civil. Soon after, however, she received a letter from Harriet in which she wrote that "her husband objected to my calling upon her, and she thought I had better not come, to prevent any disturbance between them". She also received a note from Louis: he would not have her in the house again. The next time Mrs Butterfield saw her daughter, in April 1877, she was in her coffin. Like the baby to which she had given birth only months before, Harriet had apparently starved to death while her new relatives – having smoothly banked her cash – looked coolly on.

I first heard the story of Harriet Staunton and her terrible end last summer, when I was asked to write an afterword to a new edition of a novel, long out of print, by Elizabeth Jenkins. I had only to read a few chapters to see why it deserved to be republished, and the Staunton name made infamous all over again. What a tale. Jenkins's imaginative retelling of the case is as gripping as anything I've ever read. And as horrifying. In an upstairs bedroom at the isolated Kent cottage where Harriet is effectively kept prisoner, the Stauntons' bewildered victim emits desperate animal cries, and scratches feverishly at her lice-infested skin (without her mother to help, Harriet soon loses control of her personal hygiene). Meanwhile, her new "family" carries on as normal, lazing by the fire, eating veal chops and batter puddings. Beside this spare volume, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale's bestselling account of another notorious Victorian murder, starts to seem rather wordy and dry.

Jenkins, who died in 2010, is best known for her 1954 novel, The Tortoise and the Hare, about the end of a marriage. But she had a lifelong fascination with the criminal mind, and felt that her best books were grounded in fact. The Penge Mystery, as it was known, was a famous case, not only because the details were so horrible – the newspapers of the day were replete with haunting illustrations of Harriet's last hours – but also because the trial helped to hasten the establishment of a functioning court of appeal. Jenkins, though, only learned of its full horror much later, when her brother, David, a solicitor, lent her a copy of The Trial of the Stauntons, a volume in the popular Notable British Trials Series. Turning its pages, she found herself "obsessed" by the Stauntons, and decided to write a novel about them, a book that would turn out to be, as she noted, "one of the very earliest instances – if not the earliest – of a writer's recounting a story of real life, with the actual Christian names of the protagonists and all the available biographical details, but with the imaginative insight and heightened colour which the novelist exists to supply". She would call the story Harriet, after the victim.

The novel, her fourth, was published in 1934. It was not only her first commercial success; it also won the prestigious Prix Femina Vie Heureuse (the runners-up were Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, and Antonia White's Frost in May). And no wonder. Though she later came to believe there was something "blameworthy: a sort of flagrant breach of copyright" about using real names, Harriet is a small masterpiece. Jenkins, unlike some, believed entirely in the guilt of those who, in September 1877, were found guilty at the Old Bailey of the murder by starvation of Harriet: her husband, Louis Staunton; his brother, Patrick Staunton; his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Staunton; and his lover, Alice Rhodes. Their crime involved, she wrote in a 2004 memoir, "almost unbelievable callousness and cruelty". But it is the quartet's unspoken complicity rather than their cruelty that she unpicks so deftly, presenting their crime not as a plan, but as a tacit agreement bound by their peculiarly intense relationships with one another.

Harriet is a novel in which people turn away from the truth with the same ease that they might draw a curtain over a draughty window. All four protagonists regard their own culpability (when they regard it at all) with polite distaste. Their lives remain quite delightful, unless they should happen to catch sight of their victim's shuffling, twitching form (what an annoyance she is!). Jenkins's story works on the reader because the horror has such a cosily domestic setting. The news that Harriet is to have a child is dropped into the story casually, in conversation; so, too, is the fact that the child has been born. Only a sentence or three later does the reader, realisation dawning, consider what this means: that Louis has slept with Harriet, a woman who knows nothing of sex, and whom he finds physically repulsive; that she must have found conceiving her child and giving birth utterly terrifying. And yet, for poor Harriet, much worse lies ahead.

Some time after the publication of Harriet, Jenkins received a letter from an old lady, Mrs Atkins, who wrote: "I think your story must be about the family that I was in service with when I was a young girl." The two arranged to meet, whereupon Mrs Atkins told the author that, Patrick Staunton having died in prison, his widow, on completion of her own sentence, had set herself up as the proprietor of an establishment used mostly by officers on leave from the Boer war. Elizabeth had married again, an older man, and it was Mrs Atkins's duty to take a bowl of soup to his bedroom in the middle of the morning. One day, a little late, she arrived to hear him muttering from behind the screen at the foot of his bed: "I shall get up. I'm not going to stay up here and be starved!" It was only on reading Harriet that Mrs Atkins realised the terrible import of these words. It was a story Jenkins relished.

But did Elizabeth Staunton and the others deliberately starve Harriet to death? Some believe they did not, pointing to the evidence of Clara Brown, the Stauntons' servant, who said nothing of her employers' abuse of Harriet at an initial inquest, but then, at the Old Bailey, contradicted herself by giving a detailed account of their cruelty. They question, too, the judge's handling of the trial, notably his dismissal of medical evidence which suggested that Harriet had died not from starvation but from cerebral disease, or tubercular meningitis. The Stauntons, they insist, were guilty of criminal neglect, but not of murder.

The trial ended, with a guilty verdict and Judge Hawkins's passing of the death sentence, on 26 September 1877. Soon after, a campaign for the Stauntons' reprieve began. There were petitions and public meetings, and on 14 October, some 48 hours before the hangings were due to take place, the Stauntons' mother, Mary, travelled to Balmoral in the hope of asking Queen Victoria for a reprieve (no audience was granted, though the Queen noted her visit in her diary). However, it was a leading article in the Lancet on 6 October that changed everything. The piece reiterated the medical evidence, and called upon doctors to add their names to a "memorial" to be submitted to the home secretary. Seven hundred doctors went on to sign this petition, among them Sir William Jenner. The home secretary could no longer withstand the pressure. On 14 October, the Stauntons' sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. Alice Rhodes, meanwhile, was pardoned and released.

Patrick Staunton died of consumption in Knaphill prison, Woking, in 1881, at the age of 28. Elizabeth Staunton was released from Fulham reformatory by the order of the home secretary in November 1883, whereupon she set herself up, as Jenkins discovered, as a hotelier. She lived into her 70s. Elizabeth maintained that Clara Brown was a liar, and that neither she nor the others, however indifferent to Harriet, had wanted her to die. Asked by the prison chaplain why she did not send for a doctor, she replied that they did not think her illness serious. Alice Rhodes worked behind a bar in London after her release. The baby son to whom she gave birth in prison – Louis was his father – died at six months.

In Dartmoor convict prison, Louis Staunton was a model prisoner; every Sunday evening, he served the Mass in the Roman Catholic chapel, and priests who knew him believed his penitence to be genuine. Shortly before his release early on the morning of 25 September 1897, Staunton spoke to the prison's deputy governor. He said that he had been a selfish young man, for sure. But he also repeated the claims he had made during the trial that Harriet was a drinker, and that it was this that caused her to refuse the food that was brought to her.

Louis Staunton left prison in a suit made to measure by his fellow convicts, and boarded a train to London. There, he met Alice, who had waited for him, and they were married. Alice died shortly before the outbreak of the first world war, after which Louis married for the third time. He worked, with some success, as an auctioneer. He died at the age of 83, in 1934, the same year that he achieved notoriety all over again, as the villain of a brilliant and compelling new novel.